Stately Beat Manor remains a vale of sickness and disease, as both The Beat and Future Mr. Beat had to skip all outside Inauguration festivities in exchange for sneezing. We did mount a short tribute to Patrick McGoohan by watching the excellent Escape from Alcatraz, directed by Ultimate Craftsman Don Siegel, and starring Super Hot Clint Eastwood, but that’s about it.

We have more information on The End of the Indie Pamphlet in the works. Diamond’s new policy has claimed at least one victim, AdHouse’s Superior Showcae #4, as Chris Pitzer writes on his blog.

The short & sweet: Comics are dead, long live OGNs.

The first casualty that I claim is SUPERIOR SHOWCASE #4. I was working on bringing a new issue out this summer that would have been filled with new talents that I’ve met over the last year. People whose voice may or may not have been heard before. But, I’m going to kill that issue now. Why? Well, at $2.95 there’s no way I’d get orders to put it anywhere near the new threshold. Numbers for #3 were not that great, and I can’t imagine #4 would improve.

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Comments

To my mind this could be a good thing, most of the stuff I want to read barely makes it into previews as it is so if the creators make more of an effort to alert people to their product and use POD and internet sales and such to bypass Diamond I say great. What it will need is something like the old USS Catastrophe site or Bugpowder to act as some kind of central clearing house for independent books.

I’d buy more if I could find more things I liked and a clearing house website would certainly make that easier. It just needs someone to make it. all it would need would be a listing, a page sample and a Website link. I’m sure someone with more brains then me could make it work.

“If numbers for #3 were “not that great,” than why on Earth was he going to do a #4? ”

Sven, I’d guess he was doing it out of altruistic motives. Chris obviously loves comics as a form and seems keen to publish new creators if he can do so without losing his shirt. Diamond’s changes would have cost him his shirt.

AdHouse publishes cool stuff. In the purest Fonzie sense of the word. I will buy anything they do just on their track record and how cool Chris is (instead of calling security as I kept stalking their booth at SDCC looking for pulphope, he was really nice and hooked me up with some great stuff). Superior Showcase isn’t a casualty, it’s a major one.

Pete Bangs:I’d buy more if I could find more things I liked and a clearing house website would certainly make that easier. It just needs someone to make it. all it would need would be a listing, a page sample and a Website link. I’m sure someone with more brains then me could make it work.

Someone already did, it’s called http://www.indyplanet.com. True, there’s a LOT of crap on there, but it lets you sort by publisher to narrow it down to just what you want to see.

Indyplanet is great. They’ve even got a book of the month club that helps weed out all the crap. We publish our magazine (with comics inside) through them, and it works out great for me. Like others, I’m just doing it for the love, but isn’t that where the real art comes from?